New Short-Term Rental Permit Filings, 2024 to 2026

Across the 5 registers that keep a complete filing history, 3,202 new short-term rental permits were filed from January to September 2026: 6% more than the 3,020 filed in the same months of 2025, and 15% fewer than the 3,782 of 2024. The total hides markets moving in opposite directions.

Filings by register, January to September

Rising: New Orleans permit applications (+31%), Boulder County licenses (+30%), Philadelphia limited lodging licenses (+22%). Falling: Portland accessory short-term rental permits (-23%), Nashville short-term rental permits (-11%). The registers do not record why filings change; local rule changes, enforcement drives and demand all move these numbers, so read a change as a fact about filings, not about the rental market as a whole.

Month by month

New filings per month in the same registers. Bars are scaled to the busiest month in the three years.

Filings come in waves rather than a smooth line. A city that opens a renewal window, changes its rules or starts enforcing them can double a month's count. October to December 2026 fill in as the registers publish them.

Where the most permits on file are new

A second way to see where hosts are signing up: the share of a market's records filed in the last 12 months. This uses every market whose registers publish a filing date and that has at least 100 recent filings. Texas markets are left out because the state tax roll also counts hotels.

Read the top of this table with care. Chicago's public file lists active registrations only, so registrations that lapsed are not in it and most of its rows are recent by design. Markets whose registers keep every old permit, like Nashville, look older than they are.

Why only these registers

A register can only show a trend if it keeps its old rows. Many publish current permits only: when a permit expires, it disappears. Counted by year, such a register always looks like it is growing, because last year's permits have been deleted. This study uses a register only if all of these hold:

• at least 5% of its rows are expired, inactive, denied or withdrawn, which shows it keeps history;
• its earliest filing date is before 2024;
• its latest filing date is on or after August 1, 2026, so 2026 is not cut short by a stale feed;
• it had at least 100 filings in the 2024 and 2025 windows combined.

The windows are January 1 to September 30 of each year, so 2026 compares like for like. A filing date is the application or issue date as the register publishes it.

Limits

• Five registers are not the country. The set covers the cities whose registers pass the tests above. Large statewide files (Florida, Wisconsin) publish no filing date and cannot be trended.
• Registers revise. A city can withdraw, merge or backfill rows. Counts are as published on 2026-10-08.
• Applications are not approvals. The New Orleans register counts applications, including ones later denied.

What it means for businesses that sell to hosts

New filings are new hosts: people furnishing a home, looking for cleaners, insurance, a manager or a lender. Markets where filings are rising have more of them each month. Pending and newly issued permits are the records to work first; the pending versus granted guide explains the timing, and the fresh records page lists what was added to the database each week.